So for every story I hear about "it was better back then", I just remember how much it was a horror for us and find it really hard to believe people voicing these options are actually arguing in good faith.
My experience is: devops is introduced to 2 orgs I was at (much smaller dev teams) to save money. Even though hiring devops negates any savings, but that's another story. They introduce Kubernetes (even though existing solutions were fine) as the flavor of the month to build up their resumes. They all leave after 6 months to a year and dev teams are stuck with the cleanup trying support and be in call for things we had no say in. It's harder to see logs, get a rails console, deploy, debug, etc.
Meanwhile they also spent 6 months trying to get PR apps and staging environments at one company. Something that is one click on Heroku.
If we didn't have Heroku at these companies when we started out we would have literally failed. End of story.
Things were never a problem when devs just managed this stuff. We used Heroku or Capistrano on plain EC2 and it was fine. Once you hit scale and things become more expensive then Docker on ECR / Fargate is fine. This whole dev ops fad just has to go.